Hello, we are Team Siren and over the past quarter we have been working on improving
the CoughDrop AAC application for individuals with vocal and other disabilities.
AAC stands for Augmentative and Alternative Communication, and encompasses a wide variety
of products and strategies that allow people to communicate in non-traditional ways.
CoughDrop, for instance, provides users with a board of buttons with icons and labels that
vocalize when pressed.
These kinds of devices can be key for people with verbal difficulties to have the same
conversations and opportunities as those who don't.
Within the context of CoughDrop, this means it is incredibly important for users to have
access to the buttons they need as efficiently as possible.
You got to think about communication, especially if a student is non-verbal, they have to get
whatever they want, right away.
Otherwise, there's no reason for them to do it.
While the CoughDrop application already has areas in which it excels, our Needs Expert,
Peter Cozine, pointed out that there are places where improvements can be made, especially
during board creation, which can be quite a long process and a bit hard to approach
when starting out.
Since you said for the first few weeks, it's just constantly adding new things, and some
of that information is coming from the parents and the past teachers.
In the moment it's really difficult, and that can be really key, especially for students
who have a lot of behavior that comes from not being able to communicate.
If you can't get the device changed right there to facilitate the communication, then
the device, you might as well not have it.
With that in mind, we searched for a way to make board creation as fast and easy as possible
during our development process.
We wanted to ensure we supported both the creation and modification process with whatever
changes we made.
While it was easy to get ambitious during brainstorming, we tried to keep in mind the
limited amount of time and resources on our hands and come up with a couple of new ideas
that we could really work through properly.
In the end we settled on a suggestions sidebar as well as a new file format for upload and
download.
These dynamic suggestions would adapt to a board as it is created, making it simpler
to quickly add buttons for new scenarios, like going to the zoo or getting a puppy.
The new csv file format would allow for boards to be viewed and modified in excel and is
more streamlined and approachable for new users than existing formats.
Unfortunately, we ran into some trouble when getting the CoughDrop environment up and running.
Some dependencies were out of date and took many hours of debugging to get through.
Eventually we were able to get going coding in Ruby, Javascript and web languages, on Ubuntu VMs.
We found the Datamuse API to generate word suggestions based on word association with
existing words on the board, and we added a UI element to display suggested buttons
in a sidebar and allow the user to add them to the board automatically.
For the csv portion, we created a template in excel that users could fill in to generate
new boards.
After much prototyping, coding, and revision, we were ready to try our tools with real users.
To test our additions, we invited several individuals with varying levels of familiarity
with AAC technology to try our updated version of CoughDrop's board creation interface.
First, we had them create a new board for a hypothetical scenario of a student going
to the airport and flying for the first time.
We observed their thought process, how useful they found our suggestions, and how easy the
process was for them overall.
Then, we had users test out the new feature for uploading a board from a csv file and
downloading a board.
Unfortunately, we ran into some unexpected errors that we had never seen before, but
we managed to get them fixed later.
These experiments gave us valuable feedback, which we will use to make the csv file layout
more intuitive.
These experiments were complicated by extremely slow image loading times, especially since
the app was being run remotely on a virtual machine while a video call was running, but
we managed to improve the speed in later tests, and we still obtained useful observations.
Working on this project was a really great introduction to AAC technology for me and
what really surprised me about it is the range of people that this kind of technology impacts
- you've got teachers, therapists, parents, people with verbal disabilities, people with
cognitive disabilities, and when you're designing this kind of application, you really have
to think about all those as you're going through.
Coming into this project, I was completely unaware of the challenges that are involved
in allowing people with speech impairments to communicate.
However, discussing with our needs expert really opened my eyes to a lot of these issues,
such as how creating and customizing new boards is incredibly important yet extremely time-consuming.
And I'm glad we were able to work with the AAC community to develop more efficient approaches
to streamline this process.
Working with CoughDrop was a bit of a rough experience at first, but as my role on the
team of both being the point of contact for everyone that we reached out to for testing,
as well as primarily spending my time debugging, it was a new experience for me to be able to see
the human side of development, as well as work with an existing codebase.
They made changes to an AAC system that would make modifying and editing an AAC system
(like CoughDrop) easier and more user-friendly for teachers.
I think that their contributions were really valuable - they had a predictive system of
suggested add-ons that would be especially helpful, and overall it was just really great
to see how seriously they took it and the great contributions that they made.
So I really enjoyed the process.
Overall, the changes we made improved the efficiency of the CoughDrop board creation system.
We hope that they will be useful for people with disabilities and their support networks
in the future.
Thank you for listening.
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